Article: Compadres in Scarcity: Patterns Emerge in the Bottom of the Barrel at the NI

your right it shouldnt be men versus women but im like recovery soon, i dont like me being labeled as having a female illness, its just a bloody illness. As for breast cancer, men also get it but its rarely mentioned. As for viagra, the benfits arent just for men, being alone with viagra is no fun.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in women - 250,000 deaths per year in the US versus 40,000 for breast cancer.

Of course at this time each year we are subjected to a wave of "pinkwashing" - which has come under increasing criticism on a variety of fronts; what kind of "awareness" it really raises, does it do any good at all for prevention/detection, is money really going toward productive research or is too much of it being devoted to nebulously-defined "awareness," etc. Not to mention the pinkness being applied to products that are not exactly health-promoting, such as buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The flood of pink gets bigger and more nauseously sentimental every year - but breast cancer stats aren't moving very much - not incidence, not detection, and not deaths.

As for life in our own little circle of unawareness -- Gentlemen, I feel your pain. *I* feel emasculated by the label of CFS, and I'm a woman! I guess you get to be honorary women for the purposes of CFS. It's not every day that men come along with some psychosomatic "disease" caused by their being hysterical and neurotic, but I guess there are some men special enough to earn that distinction.

So which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did CFS get dismissed because it was seen as a "women's disease," or is it seen as a "women's disease" because that makes it easier to dismiss and belittle for the greater convenience of the medical establishment? A conundrum.

"Awareness" is more than buying a product that's a certain color without bothering to ask how much it *really* helps the cause it claims to help. I think it raises interesting questions for us, who really do suffer from lack of awareness as well as lack of substantial research funding. How should we best build awareness - and if we can get it, what should we do with it?

Perhaps the gender specific aspects of this article were meant to be taken in the context of the historical treatment of women by the predominantly male medical community.

Years ago, gynecologists insisted there was no such thing as menstrual cramps. We women who complained of menstrual cramps were deemed hysterical. Those physicians were men, I assure you!

Women of my mother's generation were routinely prescribed and became addicted to an addictive benzodiazepine (valium) for hysteria and women's problems. This is not a personal recollection of my mother (she was not one of those victims, thankfully), just something that is a part of any basic women's liberation medical history.

Another part of that rather ugly history is men also medicalized childbirth taking it out of midwives' hands a long time ago (in the USA, anyway) so they could profit from it. Then doctors ridiculed the idea of washing hands before attending a woman in childbirth to prevent mysterious epidemic of childbed fever that killed women after doctors would go from autopsies straight to delivery rooms without washing their hands.

For an historical viewpoint on how male doctors treat female patients and how this is relevant to CFS, I urge you to read the wikipedia entry on hysteria part of which I quote here (red lettering is my emphasis):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria
In the early 1890s Freud published a series of articles on hysteria which popularized Charcot's earlier work and begun the development of his own views of hysteria. By the 1920s Freud's theory was influential in Britain and the USA. The Freudianpsychoanalytic school of psychology uses its own, somewhat controversial, ways to treat hysteria.
Many now consider hysteria to be a legacy diagnosis (i.e., a catch-all junk diagnosis),<SUP id=cite_ref-4 class=reference>[5]</SUP> particularly due to its long list of possible manifestations: one Victorian physician cataloged 75 pages of possible symptoms of hysteria and called the list incomplete.<SUP id=cite_ref-5 class=reference>[6]</SUP>

There are currently efforts to categorize CFS/ME as a somatiform disorder in the DSM. Sound familiar?

Sorry to any gents who may be offended, I believe Cort is just bringing our illness into proper perspective. Perhaps many younger people and many men may not be aware of the struggles the female gender has had with modern medicine because many of the gains mine and previous generations of women fought for are now taken for granted. If you're not aware perhaps that may be taken as a sign of progress, but please do not discount this ugly legacy of misogyny. It's very much affected the way CFS has been and still is perceived.

Times have changed, midwives are in the forefront of childbirth, in australia anyway. recently my wife has has female pains for which her male doctor diagnosed endometriosis and refered her to the hospital for a possible operation to correct her chronic pain. The hospital doctor she saw was a female and she told my wife theres nothing they can do and she will just have to mange her pain with brofen, she got little sympathy from this female doc and my wifes male doc said it was disgusting the way she was treated. I think male bashing is just to generalised, i think its more to do with some doctors ego's more then being male or female. As i have said early, alot of men dont seek medical treatment for many conditions and i think more money should be directed towards male awareness with medical conditions. example is that depression is higher amongst females, i beg to differ, i know alot of men who need help but drown there depression in alcohol, i think thats why suicide rates are alot higher in men, depression is seen as a female illness so men refuse to get help for it as the feel weak and inadequate. I agree with one of the other post where some illness have that much money pooring into them that i cant see it getting spent properly, its just that people think throwing money at it will produce a cure, to a certain point this is true, but alot just go's to help the fund raisers to drive flashy cars. I think women get an opportunity to talk to their docs regularly like when geting regular pap smears etc and other issues are brought up. This sort of thing doesnt happen with men, might be why women live longer then men too. We cant live in the past from other peoples actions we can only live for now and move forward.

Sorry to any gents who may be offended, I believe Cort is just bringing our illness into proper perspective. Perhaps many younger people and many men may not be aware of the struggles the female gender has had with modern medicine because many of the gains mine and previous generations of women fought for are now taken for granted. If you're not aware perhaps that may be taken as a sign of progress, but please do not discount this ugly legacy of misogyny. It's very much affected the way CFS has been and still is perceived.

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I agree with your overall point; just a minor correction...........I'm on the "younger side" if 30s is considered younger still?!

But I do see a lot of people/ women in my generation and younger who have no idea of the history and context behind this stuff. My aunt wanted her tubes tied back in the 1960s after 2 kids; my uncle was not opposed to it. She asked her doc at the time and he told her she was too young to stop producing children and wouldn't do it. There were problems obtaining birth control pills as some docs (almost all male at the time) wouldn't prescribe it out of ideological reasons rather than medical ones. This was not in the US but in Asia; nevertheless, it's the same issue of men thinking they know better than women about their own bodies. My aunt and mom are hardly "radicals" but they encouraged me to be a "feminist" even though they did not know the word and the history behind it; it felt inherently wrong to them that women were treated in the way that they were.

If you had talked to me ten years ago, I would not have claimed to be a feminist but I find there is no other way to be to if I am to stand up for my own rights and those of other women. It might be considered "unfashionable" in some circles but at this point in my life, I don't care. Feminism to me doesn't mean "special rights," its means "equal rights." It always worries me when people think treating women equally equates to taking away money/ rights/ etc. for men because it's not about a win-lose/ black-white situation.

Yes, I realize there are controversies regarding the Komen Foundation but they were effective enough that we're talking about it, right? And I don't think current controversies should decrease the contributions they have made to the advancement of cancer research.

In regards to CFS being under the Office of Research on Women's Health, I agree with the views expressed already. I know about CFS in men and have written several times to the government about it. An analogy to this is MS or even rheumatoid arthritis where a majority of sufferers are women but MS falls under NIND (neurological disorders) and RA falls under NIAID (infectious disease/ immunology) also to receive funding. Breast cancer also falls under NCI (cancer).The difficulty with CFS is it is uncertain to gov't officials currently where it falls and unfortunately we've fallen under an office with no power and no $$$. NIAID has sponsored at least one study -- Alter's -- but we need more support from them. As has been written in the past, I would encourage people to keep contacting your reps/ gov't officials, etc. about this matter.

Finally, just because a doc is a woman doesn't equal that she will listen empathetically to other women. There are some superb male doctors out there as well as we know.

I agree with your overall point; just a minor correction...........I'm on the "younger side" if 30s is considered younger still?!

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Hope123 - There are probably plenty of people my age who aren't as aware as I am of this branch of history, I'm sure. But there are even more who are younger who have no idea. Why would they? We don't encourage the study of history in the USA.

Just to put things in context, in my last years of highschool and during college, women's studies were very popular courses and I, for one, learned about it. I lived through the nascent days of women returning to the workforce after being relegated back to home and hearth following WWII. My father thought I should learn how to type while my brother should become a lawyer. Eventually I did learn to type while I was learning computer programming. That wasn't exactly what my folks had in mind for me, though! The pill had become widely available not that long before, Roe v Wade became the law of the land in 1973. Home births were almost considered illegal, and at least where I lived midwives were not a licensed profession. I'm 57, so for me it is partly living history. My contemporaries were finally allowed to become nurse/midwives. This was major progress.

No one claims to be a feminist now. It's as out of style as claiming to be a liberal, or heaven forbid, a socialist in the USA.

I've had sympathetic and unsympathetic doctors of both genders.

By the way heapsreal, I have never had a chat with my gynecologist. It's all business with gynecologists just as it is here with any other doctor. Insurance pays for only 15 minutes. After the assistant gets you to the exam room telling you to put on the exam gown after undressing, you get 5 or 10 minutes with the doc most of which is devoted to the getting in position, speculum placement (warmed up these days since they finally got a clue), cervical swab, swabbing the petri dish or whatever it is they send to the lab, checking breast tissue and arm pits, followed by a "Get dressed and meet me in my office", where they deliver the results from their physical exam. Conversation is restricted to topics of pain or infection in the localized areas of concern. Maybe they write an Rx for birth control or hormone therapy for which they must, of course, ask the appropriate questions about what other meds you're taking. The rest of the allotted 15 minutes must be for them to keep their records straight and write case notes. And this checkup is only paid for once every 2 years by my insurance.

I don't mean to sound strident here, but I think you may be laboring under some misconceptions about women having superior access to doctors. I can't speak for any country but the USA, maybe other countries are different, but that's the way things are here.

We are all, men and women, boys and girls alike, mistreated by the medical profession because we have this illness. None of us has the corner on that market. It is a sad state of affairs indeed.

ill 1977, i just think theres an opportunity to ask the doctor something when seeing them for another problem, or have some type of relationship already started with their doc and dont hesitate to see them for other problems. Men usually think their to bullet proof to see are doctor or think they are anyway and alot of adult males see there first doctor at hosptial after gettting carted there by ambulance, this might be abit far fetched but not far. U can ask a women if she has a doctor and most say yes , if u ask a male its normally mmm aaa, i dont have one or will ask the wife her docs name and say that is there doc. What im trying to get at is that most men are ignorant when it comes to there own health. I dont doubt women were treated like crap in the past, thats not what im trying to say. This is just my first hand experience of men.

I understand the frustration of the gentlemen about having a "woman's disease." It is shared by my male friends with multiple sclerosis. About 3/4 of sufferers of ME/CFS are female (the study is Jason's but I don't remember the exact numbers). That's the same % as with MS and rheumatoid arthritis. That alone is a red-flag that this disease involves immune dysfunction of some type and is not "all in your head."

Breast cancer aside (and it wouldn't be but for Koman), women have been consistently shown to get seriously short-changed in the medical world. As for more contact, sorry guys, it doesn't float -- women may go more often but studies show they are consistently dismissed (ex: doctors typically say men have "symptoms," woman have "complaints"). Thank you, Cort, for seeing and saying one of the big elephant in the room things. It would be good for all of us -- regardless of gender -- to address this whenever it comes up, especially in the media. It's also worth it (for all of us) to be sure to let people know ME/CFS affects people of both genders, all ages and all races.

That's bad enough -- but at least you can see knowing facts might change outcomes there. Today I saw reference to several studies on "ice cream headache" and why it only occurs in summer. Geez. If they need somewhere to spend research time/money HERE, HERE, DOWN IN THE FRONT!! :headache:

Thank you, Cort, for seeing and saying one of the big elephant in the room things. It would be good for all of us -- regardless of gender -- to address this whenever it comes up, especially in the media. It's also worth it (for all of us) to be sure to let people know ME/CFS affects people of both genders, all ages and all races.

If breast cancer has its pink ribbons, maybe we should all start wearing nightcaps to raise awareness. If a few thousand of us showed up to take a nap at the CDC maybe it would make the point that treating 'chronic fatigue' will require more than just a nap to get us over our 'fatigue.'

While I think Cort has done an interesting piece, I think it should be remembered that there are other conditions below these figures again. The list at: http://report.nih.gov/rcdc/categories/ isn't a list of all possible conditions as any skim through a medical dictionary would show.

Also on the men/women thing, I don't see any mention of prostatitis on the list.